Einstein and his famous theory of gravity - general relativity - are once again in the news. The LIGO-Virgo collaboration announced yesterday 11th February that they had directly detected gravitational waves for the first time. This brought worldwide excitement to the field of science.

Where we diverged in opinion with the opposition was both on calculating the cost of space exploration and on calculating the true cost that neglecting to progress into the cosmos would bring to humanity.

Euclid is a space telescope planned for launch in 2020 by the European Space Agency, and will make a map of the distribution of billions of galaxies in the Universe. This will make it possible to map the history and evolution of the dark Universe, which is the name given to describe everything we do not understand about the Universe.

In a couple of days, the final results on the search for the Higgs at CERN will be publicised, so in the meantime, I would like to dwell a bit on what comes after. Indeed, if the Higgs is found, this will only have confirmed, once more, that the Standard Model of Particle Physics was right, and was able to predict the existence of a new, exotic particle.